Chapter 19
NINETEEN
Orla was wrong – Luke didn’t take me to Pizza Express. I suppose I should have known already that Luke wasn’t a bog-standard date sort of person – but then, logically, it only took one not-bog-standard date for me to find out.
It didn’t start exactly conventionally, either, because it began with him knocking on my bedroom door at seven on that Friday evening, as we’d arranged. Dating someone I lived with already felt strange, but not in a bad way. There were so many things about each other that were already familiar: he’d seen me first thing in the morning, my hair a mess and my eyes bleary with sleep. I’d seen him swearing, tears of pain leaping involuntarily to his eyes, when he hit his thumb with a hammer.
I’d seen him in his underwear, emerging from the bathroom rubbing his hair with a towel. He’d seen me emerging from the bathroom only wearing a towel. I’d liked what I’d seen and I hoped he did too.
Now here it was: the appointed night, the new dress – even better this evening than it had looked in the shop, thanks to Orla’s pins and stitches – the knock on my door.
Shyly, I opened it.
‘Hi,’ Luke said. ‘You look lovely.’
‘So do you.’ I smiled.
He was wearing jeans, not new but not the battered, paint-splattered ones he wore to work, and a grey T-shirt so new it still bore the fold marks from the shop. I could smell his aftershave – the lavender and mint scent I recognised from that night in the pub.
‘Shall we go?’ he asked.
‘I’m ready. Are you going to tell me where we’re going? Or shall we just walk and decide?’
‘I thought’ – his smile wavered and become almost shy – ‘I wondered if you like spicy food?’
‘Love it,’ I confirmed.
‘Then we’ll go for a curry.’
I followed him downstairs, the soles of my wedge sandals loud on the bare wood. It was almost the shortest night of the year, and still bright and sunny, the daylight highlighting the new paint on the first-floor doorframes and the glossy, newly sanded floorboards, as well as the imperfections of the house: the stain on the ceiling where the damp had soaked through from above, the haze of dust motes hanging in the air, the cavernous, cluttered rooms on the ground floor, untouched as yet.
He opened the front door and we stepped out into the warm evening, turning to walk the familiar route around the square.
‘What’ll she do when it’s finished?’ Luke wondered, glancing back at the house. ‘Sell it?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’ I remembered what Orla had told me about her grandmother. ‘I think she feels kind of responsible for it – attached to it. I suppose she’ll live in it, and paint, like she said she wanted to.’
‘And rent out rooms for a hell of a lot more than she can charge in a building site.’
The idea jolted me. Although I’d only been living at Damask Square for a short time, it felt like longer. It felt like home. I didn’t want to live anywhere else and – almost more – I didn’t want anyone to live there except me, Luke and Orla. And Beatrice, of course. Maybe.
‘What are you thinking?’ Luke asked. ‘You’ve gone all – gloomy? Pensive, anyway.’
‘I was thinking about having to move.’ I sighed. ‘When it’s finished.’
He laughed. ‘We’ll probably be about ninety before that happens. Stop worrying.’
To my surprise, I found that easy. The evening was so perfect, the sense of something good beginning so strong within me, that endings felt impossibly distant.
‘So where are we going?’ I asked.
‘I thought…’ His pace had increased slightly as we left the square behind us. ‘Brick Lane.’
Really? I’d been in London long enough to know that the street, lined from end to end with a plethora of Indian restaurants whose owners stood outside their doors, competing fiercely with one another for custom, didn’t exactly scream romance.
But I said, ‘Cool. I’ve been there before, on a work night out. Two of my colleagues got seriously drunk and ended up playing frisbee with a poppadom. So we probably shouldn’t go to the Imperial Palace.’
He laughed. ‘We won’t go to the Imperial Palace. Trust me.’
Before we arrived at our destination, the scent of spices reached me. I could hear music and raised voices, and as soon as we turned the corner we found ourselves in a press of people. Tourists wandered, bewildered, from restaurant to restaurant, pausing to read the menus displayed in the windows until they either chose at random or were accosted by a proprietor and ushered inside, like it or not. A group of young men who looked like they were on a stag night pushed boisterously through one of the doorways, demanding a table – poppadom-throwing was in their future, I reckoned.
‘Free wine with your meal,’ offered a bearded man in a white kurta. ‘Best food on Brick Lane.’
Luke smiled, shaking his head politely. ‘Not tonight, thanks, mate.’
‘How do you know?’ I asked. ‘How do you know where to choose?’
‘I just do.’
A few seconds later, he stopped outside the doorway of an unassuming-looking restaurant. There were no neon lights above its door, no menu pasted in the window. The interior was simple: tables with paper cloths covering them and small wooden chairs arranged on bare floorboards.
He nodded, then pushed open the door and I followed him inside. The room was full, but there were no stag parties here, no work nights out and no tourists with camera bags. There were couples, family groups, even a few men in kufi hats eating alone, bent intently over their food.
A waiter showed us to a table with brisk efficiency and brought a jug of iced water and two menus. They weren’t the huge laminated sheets I remembered from my work dinner but printed simply on A4 paper, just a few items on each.
Luke nodded approvingly. ‘Are you hungry?’
‘Starving.’ I realised I was.
‘Then we’ll have everything.’
A few minutes later, food began to arrive. There were little fritters stuffed with potato and herbs, crisply rustling deep-fried whitebait that was like nothing I’d ever eaten in a pub, skewers of tender chicken in a sauce Luke said was made with cashew nuts and melon seeds, and finally a lamb biriyani, fragrant with saffron.
I found myself almost too immersed in the deliciousness of the food to talk much, other than exclaiming over each new flavour. Luke didn’t seem to mind – he smiled happily at my enthusiasm, answering my questions about what the spice was on the chicken, how the rice got its tender crust and whether it was all right for me to eat the whitebait with my fingers.
‘Okay,’ I said at last, unable to eat another thing. ‘Now you’ve got to tell me how you’re such an expert on Indian food.’
He laughed. ‘Must be because I am South Asian. Well – Bangladeshi. Half Bangladeshi.’
‘What?’ I looked across the table at him. His skin was dark, but no darker than mine would have been after a holiday in the sun, and his eyes were that clear, pale blue. ‘Really?’
‘Sure. Mum’s British, but my dad’s from Dhaka.’
‘I’d never have known,’ I said. ‘I mean – not that it matters, obviously.’
‘Of course it matters.’ He smiled, but there was something else in his face – sadness or perhaps anger. ‘I know I can pass as white, but it means I hear things people would never say in front of me if they knew. Horrible, racist comments.’
‘I’m sorry. That must be – well, I can’t really imagine.’
‘It’s okay.’ He shrugged. ‘You get used to it. I call people out on it sometimes, just to see them squirm.’
‘And I guess every time you go home to your mum and dad you get to eat delicious food like this,’ I joked.
He grimaced. ‘Sadly not. My parents aren’t together any more, and I don’t really see my dad.’
‘That’s so hard.’ I was torn between wanting to know more about him and not wanting to pry into something I sensed had caused him deep hurt. ‘Did they separate a long time ago?’
‘They didn’t separate. They were separated. Dad came out here on a student visa, to study law. He and Mum got together at uni and I was – well, I was a mistake. They never got married, because Dad knew he’d struggle to get that past his family. But they were happy together, I think, until I was about four.’
‘Then what happened?’
He poured more water into our glasses. ‘1988 happened. Massive crackdown on illegal migrants. Dad had to go back to Bangladesh, and I guess at first they both thought he’d be able to come back. But he never did.’
‘You never saw him again?’
‘I did at first. They both tried. Mum took me out there to visit him and when I was a bit older I went on my own. But he – I wasn’t enough to make him want to jump through hoops to come back here. He never forgave the British government for what had happened. And when I was twelve he got married to someone else.’
I could just about imagine it. The effort to keep a little unit of three together, even across such a distance, a chasm widened by time and politics and family pressures. And Luke, stuck in the middle until he drifted inexorably to one side.
‘That’s so sad,’ I said.
‘Hey, it’s all in the past now.’ He gestured for the bill. ‘And I’m bringing the mood right down, rambling about myself. What about your family, anyway? You go back home and see them often?’
‘Hardly ever.’ I hesitated. ‘I don’t… I don’t really like where they live.’
‘Nottingham?’ He looked puzzled.
‘Nottingham’s all right. It’s more – it’s their house. I don’t like going there much.’
‘But you’re cool with living in a building site?’
I laughed. ‘Trust me, Damask Square’s a palace compared to what I’m used to. Why don’t we go on somewhere and have a drink?’
He agreed and I thanked him profusely for the meal, which he insisted on paying for. We found a nearby bar and shared a bottle of red wine, talking about things that weren’t sad at all. Listening to his voice and the joyful sound of his laughter, admiring his strong hands as he lifted his glass, discovering the way his smile was slightly lopsided, I found myself hoping – longing, even – for him to kiss me.
And, just before we arrived home, he did. In the shadow cast by the plane tree, the street lamp obscured, he took me in his arms and I turned my face up to his. Our lips met, tentatively at first and then more urgently, our bodies pressing together in the cooling evening.
Then we unlocked the door of Orla’s house and went upstairs to our separate bedrooms.